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Internship, Summer, and Georgia Tech!

As I mentioned in the previous blog post, I was offered a 12-week part-time paid Software Engineering Internship with Travelport beginning mid-February and ending early May. My role there was with the Enterprise Architecture team where I worked on a research project into Event-Driven systems in conjunction with Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). I gained experience with JAX-WS (the Java API for XML Web Services) to build web services, using IBM’s Rational Application Developer (Eclipse-based IDE) and WebSphere Application Server. I learned about SOAP and sending messages between web services defined by a WSDL file. With these tools, my research was mostly WS-Notification, a standard for a Publisher-Subscriber design pattern, and how it might be useful for sending messages from a single or multiple publishers to many subscribers. I wrote code, compiled documentation, and presented my findings to the CIO and the Senior Leadership Team. Overall I really enjoyed the experience, loved all the new technology that I learned, and had a lot of fun learning from and interacting with the other interns there.

After the internship and the Spring semester ended, I decided to forgo taking Summer courses or working. As the internship required 20 hours per week in addition to the 17-credit-hour courses I was taking, I had lost a massive amount of sleep and endured quite a bit of stress, therefore I was in desperate need of rest. Thus these 3 months of Summer I am taking a break from working and going back to playing video games, hanging out with friends, and relaxing with my programming hobby. The video game I mostly play is Battlefield 4 but I just bought the BioShock Triple Pack from the Steam Summer sale and will be finally playing all 3 games of the series.

For my programming hobby, I have multiple interests at the moment. OpenGL is currently my favorite tool and I’ve been playing a lot with it, especially using shaders for really cool effects! I’m also branching out into web development, and I’ve started learning more HTML+CSS along with backend languages such as Ruby, Python, and PHP. I’ve been told to avoid PHP as much as possible, however I will learn its basics just to be prepared as it is still in the top 10 most used languages according to the TIOBE index unfortunately. Java (and the JVM in general) is still the best for developing backend services, with excellent frameworks like Spring and Play! that I’ve been playing with. Another interest that I’m trying to dabble more into is more low-level into assembly, C, and C++. I received Bjarne Stroustrup’s latest edition of The C++ Programming Language for my birthday last year and I’ve been reading it bit by bit whenever I have time. For now however, I don’t seem to have settled on a direction for myself, as I’m interested in all things code so as I play more with these tools, I will settle and specialize in my favorite (taking into consideration what will get me a job 😀 )

Lastly, as I mentioned in a blog post over a year ago, my plan was to attend Georgia State University for a year and attempt to transfer to Georgia Institute of Technology. I’m glad to announce that I’ve been ACCEPTED to Georgia Tech starting in Fall 2014!! This university is in the top 10 Computer Science schools in the US and I have dreamed of attending it since I realized Computer Science was my future in high school. I worked very hard to maintain excellent grades in my year at Georgia State and I will now be working even harder to maintain a very high GPA and graduate with highest honors from Georgia Tech! Hopefully it won’t be too difficult to find the motivation to study my ass off as I have passion for this subject and its courses.